1st Edition
Genre and Reception in the Gothic Parody Framing the Subversive Heroine
This book brings together an analysis of the theoretical connection of genre, reception, and frame theory and a practical demonstration thereof, using a set of parodies of the first wave of the Gothic novel, ranging from well-known titles such as Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, to little known and researched titles such as Mary Charlton’s Rosella.
Münderlein traces the development of socio-political debates conducted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on female roles, behaviour, and subversion from the subtly subversive Gothic novel to the Gothic parody. Combining two major areas of research, literary criticism and Gothic studies, the book provides both a new take on an ongoing debate in literary criticism as well as an in-depth study of a virtually neglected aspect of Gothic studies, the Gothic parody.
1 Introduction: framing the Gothic novel
2 Some theory: genre, reception, parody, and frame and how they are connected
3. Parodying the excessive: the Gothic novel versus the Gothic parody
4 Framing the Gothic heroine: from subtle subversion to complacency?
5 Conclusion: framing the parody, changing the genre – Gothic parody, the reader and frames
Biography
Kerstin-Anja Münderlein is a research assistant at the Department of English Literature at the University of Bamberg. Her research interests include genre and reception theory, especially in connection with the Gothic novel and parody of the long eighteenth century, the literature of the Great War, and early and Golden Age British crime fiction. She has published an edited collection on exploration, discovery, and conquest in the long eighteenth century. Currently she is working on the representation of gender roles in Golden Age and neo-Golden Age crime fiction. This book, which is a rewriting of her 2018 dissertation, traces the relationship of genre, reception, and frames in the Gothic parodies of the long eighteenth century, focussing the socio-political subversion (or lack thereof) of the Gothic and parody heroine.
